My eyelids were heavy as lead. My body lay limp, as though I had fallen asleep after staying up for several nights straight. Where am I? Why does it hurt so much?
In the darkness, faint, jumbled images appeared and vanished again and again. Flashing red and blue lights. The sound of sirens grew distant, then close again beside my ears. My body shook.
The sensation of lying on something hard and moving quickly. Streetlights streaking past at my side. A ceiling… another ceiling… ceilings that kept changing.
Urgent voices. Shouts and orders I couldn’t understand. Many hands touched me. The sound of clothing being cut. The cold clang of metal. The clicking of machinery. My body was moved again. With a rattling noise, I heard a door open and close somewhere.
Under white lights, countless faces. They were all women’s faces. Startled expressions, urgent hands. Gazes scanning my body from head to toe. The sensation of something being attached and connected to me. More unfamiliar mechanical sounds began to fill my ears. Beep—beep—beeeep—
Those images appeared and disappeared, cutting off and mixing together like the film of an old projector. I had no idea where I was now, or why I was seeing these scenes. I felt dizzy and confused.
And at the end of that chaotic panorama… one scene fixed itself clearly in place.
A dark road at night. From far away, approaching me… an unbearably enormous white light. Headlights. That light rushed toward me as though it would swallow me whole in an instant.
Screeeech! The sharp sound of tires scraping the road.
Baaang!!! A dull, heavy crash.
The sound of everything shattering.
Extreme pain, as though my entire body was being crushed. The feeling of being lifted into the air. And then…
A darkness and nothingness in which I could see nothing at all.
Along with that terrible impact, the final shard of memory struck my mind… and a moment later… with a gasping sound as though something were waking me, as though I were about to stop breathing, I was able to open my eyes.
“…A hospital…”
The IV stuck in my arm and the white ceiling… It was unfamiliar, but I could roughly tell where I was.
“I’m not dead…”
Even thinking back on the accident made my blood run cold. I had set off when the light turned green, and my last memory was being hit by a truck that had run the red light.
I carefully wiggled my fingers. They moved smoothly, without any creaking sensation. This time, my toes. The feeling there was vivid as well.
Just in case, I tried raising my upper body, but no crushing pain or scream burst out.
(No way…)
A truck had definitely rammed into me from behind. The image of that massive radiator grille filling my rearview mirror with blackness was still vivid in my mind.
The chance that I, who had been riding nothing but a motorcycle, would survive after being hit by a truck was virtually zero. And yet, by some heavenly luck, I was now perfectly fine.
Not only was I not in a cast, I didn’t even have so much as a common bandage wrapped around me. I couldn’t even feel the chronic back pain I’d lived with since before the accident. If anything, my body felt as light as a feather, like someone who had slept deeply and woken up refreshed.
“Hah, seriously… did I save a country in my past life or something?”
A hollow laugh slipped from my mouth. This couldn’t be explained by simply saying I had been lucky. I lifted both my arms, turned them this way and that, and even clenched my fists in the air. There wasn’t even the stiffness of startled muscles. They said the aftereffects of a traffic accident came later, but this was before even discussing aftereffects—there were no injuries to begin with.
“Thank you… Thank you so much.”
Words of gratitude toward no one in particular burst out on their own. Whether it was God, my ancestors, or the truck driver turning the wheel at the last second, my chest swelled at the fact that not only was I alive, but my limbs and body were intact.
To have stepped onto the threshold of death and returned without so much as a scratch. This was the greatest luck and miracle of my life. Soaked in relief, I sank deep into the hospital bed and savored this unbelievable fortune.
“But isn’t this a private room?”
However, before the realization that I had survived could fully sink in, the hospital room I was in caught my eye. Seeing the spacious hospital room that looked like something a chaebol chairman would use on TV, the first thing that came to mind was the hospital bill.
“If I lie around in a place like this for just a few days, my pathetic bank balance will obviously go into the red in no time…”
Even if insurance covered it, there had to be a limit. No matter how much the truck was at fault, this was going too far. I was just agonizing over whether I should pull out the IV and run to the administrative office to ask to be moved to a shared room, or whether I should secretly run away.
Click.
Breaking the silence, the hospital room door opened. I instinctively shrank back and looked toward the door. Naturally, I expected a doctor or nurse in a white coat to come in, and I was already racking my brain for an excuse.
But the person who opened the door and came in was completely different from what I had expected.
Click, clack.
With the crisp sound of high heels, a woman appeared. She had long, straight hair and wore a stylish fitted suit dress. At a glance, she looked to be in her early thirties, and she possessed a dazzling beauty that would be believable even if someone said she was an actress on TV.
(Who is she? An employee from the other driver’s insurance company?)
She was the kind of person I would never have encountered anywhere along the trajectory of my life. I stared at her blankly, only blinking. But the woman’s reaction was strange.
The moment our eyes met, her proud-looking eyes instantly filled with tears. She dropped the luxury handbag she was holding to the floor with a thud, and her lips trembled.
“……!”
It was an expression as though she had seen a dead person come back to life. Thinking she must have come to the wrong room, I was about to open my mouth.
“Minho!”
She screamed my name and rushed toward the bed. And before I could even grasp the situation, she threw her arms around my neck.
“Uh…? Ugh!”
“Thank goodness… Thank goodness… sob…!”
The thick scent of rose perfume washed over me, along with the feel of soft skin. My flustered arms flailed in the air, not knowing where to go. How on earth was I supposed to take this situation, where a woman I was meeting for the first time—an unbelievably beautiful one at that—called my name, embraced me, and sobbed?
“Excuse me? Wh-who are you?!”
At my one sentence, the air in the hospital room froze in an instant. The strength slowly drained from the arms that had been hugging me hard enough to crush me.
With a face gone pale as though she had seen a ghost, she grabbed my shoulders and drew back.
“What… did you just say?”
Her voice trembled faintly. As if she couldn’t believe it, she stared straight through my face. Her unfocused, wavering pupils dug persistently into my eyes, as though trying to confirm that my reaction wasn’t a lie.
“It’s me… It’s me. Do you really not know who I am? Minho, you’re not joking right now, are you?”
At her urgent cry, I instinctively flinched and pulled back. Seen up close, her face was still so beautiful it took my breath away. But that was all.
In the twenty-odd years of my life, no matter how deeply I searched through the fragments of those barren, miserable memories, there was no woman so dripping with elegance as this. I answered with as polite and troubled an expression as I could manage.
“Um… I’m really sorry, but didn’t you come to the wrong room?”
The moment my answer fell, her mouth fell open blankly. Her hands, which had been gripping my shoulders, dropped weakly. She muttered with a dazed expression, like someone who had been struck in the head with a hammer.
“No way… How…”
At the deep despair in her eyes, I instead felt as though I had become the one who had done something wrong, and cold sweat ran down my spine. She was far too unfamiliar to be someone I knew, yet her sorrow was far too sincere for her to be a stranger.
Just as she staggered and was about to collapse to the floor, the hospital room door flew open once more with a commotion.
“What’s going on?”
A doctor and nurses in white coats poured in. It seemed they had come running after receiving notice that I had woken up. The doctor looked back and forth between the woman standing there, pale as a sheet, and me, sitting dumbfounded on the bed, then hurried to my side.
“Patient! Can you hear my voice? Do you know where you are?”
The doctor urgently lifted my eyelid and shone a penlight into it. The flash in front of my eyes made me frown without meaning to.
“Ah, that’s bright… I know I’m in a hospital, but why is everyone acting like this…?”
“Consciousness is clear… Pupillary response is normal too…”
The doctor let out a sigh of relief, then placed the stethoscope against me and removed it, carefully checking my condition. He seemed to suspect a concussion or post-traumatic stress disorder.
After finishing the basic examination, the doctor clicked his pen with a grave expression, then carefully opened his mouth.
“Your physical responses are so normal that it could be called a miracle, but… there may have been a temporary shock to your brain.”
“What? I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
“Then let me ask you just one thing to confirm.”
The doctor indicated with his chin the woman standing blankly beside the bed. The woman was still looking at me with tearful eyes, her gaze filled with desperation.
“Do you truly not remember who this person is?”
I glanced at her once again. Her glamorous outfit, her refined appearance—no matter how hard I wracked my brain, she was someone who did not exist in my memories.
“As I said earlier… this is really my first time seeing her.”
At my firm answer, the doctor clicked his tongue as though troubled, adjusted his glasses, and looked straight at me.
“Patient, this may come as a great shock, but please listen calmly.”
“Huh? To what?”
After a brief pause, the doctor dropped an utterly unbelievable bombshell.
“This person is your mother.”
“……Pardon?”